Bitcoin discussion and news

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

Horses don't plough fields without human direction. Energy has to be directed by someone somewhere in order to do anything that one might consider useful. There is still the question of who is directing the work, and who is at the coalface doing it.

Slaves in the Ante-bellum South didnt pick cotton without slave master's direction. The question of who is directing the energy and who is considering it useful is critical. In a wage economy, the person with capital decides what is useful (can provide maximum surplus value) and directs human labour towards it by returning some of the labour (energy) expended in the form of money (stored energy). but take a beaver building a dam, no human is in charge of them, but still they build the dam...because beavers value dams.

You think bitcoin mining servers run themselves?

Erm, yeah, pretty much. You would have a few employees per farm fixing broken rigs, dealing with emergencies, but once the set up is done, then yeah, they do pretty much run themselves.

No, it is not "stored energy", let alone "crystalised". You can't feed bitcoin into an electric heater and get it to work. You have to convince someone else that the bunch of electronic digits you possess have sufficient value to be worth exchanging for either electricity, or more likely actual money to buy electricity. Most power suppliers don't accept bitcoin..

Which is how pay as you go meters work basically....but thats an aside. Look at other key currency ajacent commodities - gold and oil. Both of those are forms of stored energy, they have been crystalised into money through the gold standard and the petro-dollar respectively. Bitcoin directly crystalises the energy through computational prroof of work.

No. Money is value, not energy.

Money is a representation of value, and that value comes from energy....its worth reading Podilinsky himself rather than dismissive critiques.

Why? Hardly anyone uses them. US dollars, on the other hand...

Because there will only ever be 21m bitcoin. When someone pays me 1btc, I know that they are paying me 1/21m of the sum of value of bitcoin. When someone pays me a dollar, the Federal Reserve could go on a printing spree the next day.

People also get wages made up with tips. Doesn't it mean it's a good idea.

Increasingly people are choosing to, either by asking for their wages in crypto, or going through a payment processor like Bitwage.

 

[kabbes]

Whether people get paid in Bitcoin is irrelevant to the question of whether it is a unit of account. People can get paid in apples — doesn’t make apples into something used in a ledger

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Which is how pay as you go meters work basically....but thats an aside. Look at other key currency ajacent commodities - gold and oil. Both of those are forms of stored energy, they have been crystalised into money through the gold standard and the petro-dollar respectively. Bitcoin directly crystalises the energy through computational prroof of work.

Money doesn't 'store' anything in the literal sense you mean it. It is a representation of an obligation, created in a form that people trust enough to accept it as payment. Gold has value because people value it - it's shiny and rare, it doesn't tarnish, it has some other uses as well. It came to be used in exchange because those qualities were reliable enough for people to trust them. But it doesn't store anything other than the fact that people value it. Petrol has value because it really is a store of energy that can be put to useful work. And you see how easily its value collapses when the world doesn't want that energy.

The computation that hoovers up energy to unlock the blocks is entirely useless. The electronic tokens themselves are simply that - electronic tokens. Money, meanwhile, actual money, represents useful work - the work done by the millions of people who accept that money in return for their useful labour.

There is no direct connection between the energy wasted on mining and the exchange value of bitcoin at any one time. You should see that clearly enough by the way it varies in price so wildly. Its value is very simply based on the belief of enough people that it will go up in value - a belief that is in part sustained by people believing stuff like the rubbish you are posting. One day - I was rather hoping sooner rather than later, but clearly it's going to be later - bitcoin's value will collapse to nothing. That's what ponzi schemes do eventually.

You've confused the symbol with that which it symbolises. Money doesn't store energy. It is merely a record of debt, a record backed in various ways by the authority to enforce the debt. Even when central banks print money, that debt is still recorded. The money wouldn't exist without it.

Meanwhile, everyone involved in it is complicit with a gigantic moral crime. It is a despicable, criminal waste.

 

[kabbes]

Indeed. You try telling the UK government that you’ve been paid 1 bitcoin so your income tax should be 0.2 bitcoins — see where that gets you. They will want to know what was the Sterling value of what you got paid on the day you were paid and they will demand 20% of that value — in Sterling — as tax. That’s what makes money into money.

 

[NoXion]

Slaves in the Ante-bellum South didnt pick cotton without slave master's direction. The question of who is directing the energy and who is considering it useful is critical. In a wage economy, the person with capital decides what is useful (can provide maximum surplus value) and directs human labour towards it by returning some of the labour (energy) expended in the form of money (stored energy). but take a beaver building a dam, no human is in charge of them, but still they build the dam...because beavers value dams.

The point is that value is ultimately generated by the conscious efforts of human beings. Beavers don't operate economies and have no concept of value.

Erm, yeah, pretty much. You would have a few employees per farm fixing broken rigs, dealing with emergencies, but once the set up is done, then yeah, they do pretty much run themselves.

No, they don't. Even you admit that they require maintenance. But they also need to be set up in the first place. By humans.

Which is how pay as you go meters work basically....but thats an aside. Look at other key currency ajacent commodities - gold and oil. Both of those are forms of stored energy, they have been crystalised into money through the gold standard and the petro-dollar respectively. Bitcoin directly crystalises the energy through computational prroof of work.

Bollocks. The value of bitcoin is all over the place, bearing no relation to the energy used in driving the computations that generate it.

Money is a representation of value, and that value comes from energy....its worth reading Podilinsky himself rather than dismissive critiques.

When you use energy to create something of value, that energy is gone. It's not stored. It's been turned into waste heat. Now this isn't a problem if the energy was used to feed people or drive machines or something else at least somewhat useful before that happens. But's that not how bitcoin works. You have to waste shitloads of energy just to make a bunch of electronic tokens. Which are only considered valuable by a small minority of the world's idiots.

Because there will only ever be 21m bitcoin. When someone pays me 1btc, I know that they are paying me 1/21m of the sum of value of bitcoin. When someone pays me a dollar, the Federal Reserve could go on a printing spree the next day.

The value of bitcoin fluctuates more wildly than USD. With only 21m bitcoin around this is inevitable. In the real economies of the world, the money supply grows.

Increasingly people are choosing to, either by asking for their wages in crypto, or going through a payment processor like Bitwage.

That doesn't actually demonstrate how that's any good.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

When you use energy to create something of value, that energy is gone. It's not stored. It's been turned into waste heat. Now this isn't a problem if the energy was used to feed people or drive machines or something else at least somewhat useful before that happens. But's that not how bitcoin works. You have to waste shitloads of energy just to make a bunch of electronic tokens. Which are only considered valuable by a small minority of the world's idiots.

yep. And this is the most irritating bit about this magical thinking. It's abuse of language to call it a store of energy. It's the opposite - it is a destruction of useful energy. You're just increasing entropy, and that has real-world consequences for all of us. If this idiotic pyramid scheme didn't affect the rest of us, I wouldn't be so bothered by it. But it does, so I am.

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

Oh goodness, I dont even know where to start with this, but let me try.

kabbes - Bitcoin is literally kept in a ledger - a decentralised ledger, a copy of that ledger is held by all of the miners who account for who owns which units, and those units are bitcoin (fractions).

Of course the British government wants to collect taxes in Sterling, thats because they issue the Sterling. Modern monetary theory is worth reading on that - that governments can issue as much of their currency as they like so long as they can collect the taxes in that currency.

littlebabyjesus

Money is a commodity, a special form of commodity. All commodities have value, but some commodities end up being the backers of money....notably gold and oil. Both these commodities store energy...gold from the energy that is requried for the creation of that element, and oil from the volcanic pressure. Oil has an added property that the energy can be released, whereas with gold it cannot. The C20th saw a move from the gold standard to the petro-dollar and a mirrored shift in the global economy. Enormous amounts of energy has been expended over the last decade with very little care....and we are reaping the consequences of it now with climate change.

The problem is human supremacy. Earlier NoXion dismissed animal labour and now you are dismissing computing labour. Labouris being done by those computers to mine that bitcoin. Wages are amounts of energy that are given to people in exchange for their particular expended energy (ie labour), and the energy that they have expended previously in skills aquisition etc. Those wages are then distributed to people across the supply chain where they put in their energy (labour)

FIat money is a record of debt enforced by authorities who have a monopoly on violence to enforce that debt....but money doesnt have to be that way. That is what Bitcoin is offering an exit from.

NoXion The idea that Beavers have no concept of value or economic activity because they are just dumb animals is how we are in this hellscape. Of course beavers value things....do you think they value an Xbox more or fresh water more? See, they dont look quite so dumb now, do they? Yes, at the moment humans still set up mining rigs and monitor them, but gradually human intervention will lesson. Robots are much quicker and cleverer than any human.

The value of bitcoin is unchanging, one bitcoin is always worth one bitcoin, 1/21m of the total supply. Yes its exchange rate with the dollar goes up and down in the short term, but over the longer term the exchange rate operates predictably on a four year cycle that can be relatively easily calculated.from the amount of energy that has been dispensed into the network (the hashrate) and current dollar cost per joule summed.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Ok I don't have the energy to deal with all of that, so I'll just make a couple of points.

People certainly wasted plenty of energy trying to make gold, but it was valued long before anything was known about the energy required to form it inside supernovas. It was just there, in the ground, in small quantities, for people to find. God put it there, whatever. How it got there and how much energy that took was irrelevant.

And there's no polite way to put this. Your last paragraph is the biggest pile of nonsense I have read about anything in a while. Not a single piece of it makes any sense whatsoever. I don't know how to help you on that if you don't see it. You're a very long way down a rabbit hole.

 

[mx wcfc]

Bitcoin serves no function in the support of human life. It feeds no one. It makes nothing that makes anyone's life better except a few people who get rich.
Most importantly, it consumes vast amounts of energy at exactly the time that, as a species and a planet, we need to stop doing that.

I hope the whole shit show collapses.

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

Whether or not people knew about the energy is irrelevant. They chose something that takes a great deal of energy to create to represent value.

Let me see if I can break down my last paragraph a bit.

The value of bitcoin is unchanging, one bitcoin is always worth one bitcoin, 1/21m of the total supply.

Bitcoin is mined according to an algorithm. That algorithm controls the fixed total supply of 21m and the gradual increase in the circulating supply from zero to 21m over 130ish years on a known release rate. Contrast with the dollar, one dollar was worth more of the total supply than it was ten years ago and there is no way to predict what percentage of the total supply it may be in the future. So within the dollar system, one dollar in 2010 is worth less than one dollar in 2020, but one btc is, was and will always be 1/21m of the total supply.



Yes its exchange rate with the dollar goes up and down in the short term, but over the longer term the exchange rate operates predictably on a four year cycle that can be relatively easily calculated.from the amount of energy that has been dispensed into the network (the hashrate) and current dollar cost per joule summed.

This is a good read on the energy value equivalence.

Bitcoin Value-Energy Equivalence

The Intrinsic Value of Bitcoin as Determined by Energy Spent

medium.com

 

[Saul Goodman]

A marxist analysis of Bitcoin doesnt work because marxism relies on the Labour Related Theory of Value, but as Podilinsky pointed out, Human Labour is only one form of work (ie directed energy), and we dismiss the directed energy from other sources (eg the horse that ploughs the fields).

Bitcoin is crystalised stored energy. Money is the closest proximation we have had to that so far. Bitcoin is far superior to money.

And, yes, people do receive their wages in cryptocurrency.

Bollocks. Bitcoin is a silly ponzi scheme that's Controlled by a handful of people and costs more actual money to keep it afloat than any possible perceived value.

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

mx wcfc
Bitcoin mining is the most environmentally friendly industry bar none. Nearly 80% of the energy used in bitcoin mining is from renewable sources. This isnt because miners are do-gooding tree huggers, its because security of energy supply is critical to their business. They need energy today, but they will also need it in the future, it is their most important commodity, far too important to just burn. Vast investments have gone into renewable technologies because of bitcoin.

 

[Saul Goodman]

mx wcfc
Bitcoin mining is the most environmentally friendly industry bar none. Nearly 80% of the energy used in bitcoin mining is from renewable sources. This isnt because miners are do-gooding tree huggers, its because security of energy supply is critical to their business. They need energy today, but they will also need it in the future, it is their most important commodity, far too important to just burn. Vast investments have gone into renewable technologies because of bitcoin.

Absolute bollocks. Are you selling mining rigs?

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

Absolute bollocks. Are you selling mining rigs?

Study: Over 74% of Bitcoin Mining is Powered by Renewable Energy

Cryptocurrency investment products and research firm CoinShares estimates that 74.1% of bitcoin mining is powered by renewable energy.

cointelegraph.com

 

[Saul Goodman]

Study: Over 74% of Bitcoin Mining is Powered by Renewable Energy

Cryptocurrency investment products and research firm CoinShares estimates that 74.1% of bitcoin mining is powered by renewable energy.

cointelegraph.com

That study is bollox. The vast majority of mining is done on free or stolen energy.
Edit: oh look, a mining site tries to make mining look viable ... FFS!

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

That study is bollox. The vast majority of mining is done on free or stolen energy.
Edit: oh look, a mining site tries to make mining look viable ... FFS!

Free or stolen energy? Really? That was possibly true in 2010, but where have you been for the last 10 years?

Do you think this is run by tapping the nearby lamppost?

 

[Saul Goodman]

Free or stolen energy? Really? That was possibly true in 2010, but where have you been for the last 10 years?

Do you think this is run by tapping the nearby lamppost?

Have you ever heard of a place called Iran?
I'll bet a pound to a shard of shit you're invested in bitcoin.

 

[BigTom]

mx wcfc
Bitcoin mining is the most environmentally friendly industry bar none. Nearly 80% of the energy used in bitcoin mining is from renewable sources. This isnt because miners are do-gooding tree huggers, its because security of energy supply is critical to their business. They need energy today, but they will also need it in the future, it is their most important commodity, far too important to just burn. Vast investments have gone into renewable technologies because of bitcoin.

All that renewable energy could be used for something useful. Instead it is wasted on bitcoins. Which means non-renewable energy is being used elsewhere that could have been renewable energy.
You cannot fucking claim that bitcoin is environmentally friendly when all of that energy is wasted, when all of the production inputs into the mining rigs etc all use materials and energy and cause environmental degredation.

I mean seriously, the most environmentally friendly industry bar none? bar NONE! Nothing else is more environmentally friendly. Not even the renewable energy industry itself ... or other industries whose actual output contributes towards environmental sustainability and CO2 reductions.

Does the bitcoin industry help prevent climate change or does it contribute to it? Cos there are industries which actually help prevent climate change.
You are so far down this rabbit hole like LBJ said that you can't even see that.

 

[BigTom]

Whether or not people knew about the energy is irrelevant. They chose something that takes a great deal of energy to create to represent value.

Let me see if I can break down my last paragraph a bit.

The value of bitcoin is unchanging, one bitcoin is always worth one bitcoin, 1/21m of the total supply.

Bitcoin is mined according to an algorithm. That algorithm controls the fixed total supply of 21m and the gradual increase in the circulating supply from zero to 21m over 130ish years on a known release rate. Contrast with the dollar, one dollar was worth more of the total supply than it was ten years ago and there is no way to predict what percentage of the total supply it may be in the future. So within the dollar system, one dollar in 2010 is worth less than one dollar in 2020, but one btc is, was and will always be 1/21m of the total supply.



Yes its exchange rate with the dollar goes up and down in the short term, but over the longer term the exchange rate operates predictably on a four year cycle that can be relatively easily calculated.from the amount of energy that has been dispensed into the network (the hashrate) and current dollar cost per joule summed.

This is a good read on the energy value equivalence.

Bitcoin Value-Energy Equivalence

The Intrinsic Value of Bitcoin as Determined by Energy Spent

medium.com

What happens when 1m bitcoins are lost in wallets people have forgotten the password to/lost the hard drive it's stored on? What about when that's 5m? 10m? 21m?
What happens when the amount of bitcoins in circulation cannot circulate quickly enough to manage the transactions that people want to do with bitcoins?

Your first statement is just circular nonsense. A bitcoin is always worth a bitcoin, lol. That's totally irrelevant, what matters is what I can buy with that bitcoin, and since basically everything is priced in £ that means that the value of bitcoin is totally utterly dependent on the exchange rate to £.
If you want an economy to run on bitcoins then you need to be able to sensibly answer the two questions above, and probably some others as well. Until then the value of bitcoins is totally the exchange value to the currency people actually use to value things.

 

[kabbes]

Others are dealing with the important stuff, but I want to make sure this isn’t lost:

kabbes - Bitcoin is literally kept in a ledger - a decentralised ledger, a copy of that ledger is held by all of the miners who account for who owns which units, and those units are bitcoin (fractions).

Of course the British government wants to collect taxes in Sterling, thats because they issue the Sterling. Modern monetary theory is worth reading on that - that governments can issue as much of their currency as they like so long as they can collect the taxes in that currency.

Yes, Bitcoin tracks bitcoin on what it calls a ledger. But this is not the same thing as a ledger used to keep track of goods and services. Nobody is using bitcoin to track the value of their business. It’s the other way round — Bitcoin derives its value from the business that people are willing to translate its worth into, having converted this based on that date’s exchange rate.

Your last paragraph — i.e. that the British government collects taxes in Sterling because they issue the Sterling — is the whole fucking point of what money is. It’s currency that is backed up by being the unit of account. And that unit of account is determined by actual hegemonic power, which is backed up by the ability to make that power stick. The unit of account will be never be set by nerds that keep track of a game on the 21st century equivalent on a spreadsheet. Anonymity is not power pretty much by definition of power.

It’s this accounting purpose backed up by hegemonic power that keeps money stable. When the power fails, that’s when you see the money associated with it disintegrate. There is a certain amount of economic activity in the country and the government keeps track of it for its own purpose; the stability in this total is the stability of the government’s currency. A pound of Sterling is a pound of the power that backs up what Sterling represents. You want to live in the UK, you have to play by the UK’s rules, which involves telling them your financial business and accounting for it. Bitcoin has none of that — just the volatile sentiment of that day’s supply and demand.

The only true thing you’ve said is:

Oh goodness, I dont even know where to start with this

 

[kabbes]

I think people’s confusion about what money really is comes from never having to actually deal with the reality of multiple units of account and getting that visceral sense of where its power is coming from.

I work for a multinational insurer, and I have responsibility within the European region. The group is owned from the US, the insurance business underwritten by the European region is done so across (amongst other places) the UK, the EU states and the other non-EU European countries. This business can be multinational, which means you might sell a policy in Italy that is denominated in Japanese Yen covering the interests of a Japanese company across its “non-Japan” area, including countries outside the Eurozone. The main insurance entities that the business are written into are domiciled in an EU country and the UK (although there are others).

The internal unit of account is the USD. This is because the group want to know how it is getting on in the currency that it will ultimately account to its shareholders in. If the European region does well but the USD increases heavily in value, the group will ultimately be disappointed.

Despite this internal unit of account, however, the regulators and tax authorities of the EU legal entity want all accounts for their legal entity denominated in Euros. Each premium is converted to Euros at the day of sale (if it isn’t already in Euros) and each insurance claim is likewise converted. The UK regulators and tax authorities similarly want all accounts for their legal entity denominated in Sterling.

This accounting in Euro and Sterling provides the basis for those currencies. And it’s the hegemonic power of the state that you are operating in that creates the ability to demand it. The fact that actual business is transacted in Yen (or even Bitcoin) and that we internally track it in USD is neither here nor there to that fundamental power to crystallise the value in Euro and Sterling. It’s not the trade that is providing the value, it’s the reckoning of that trade.

Furthermore, each individual country that the insurance contract is sold in will also demand that this is tracked in their currency and accounts produced in that currency, for tax purposes. This also feeds the stability of that currency. Again, it’s the power of the state to be able to insist on this in their currency if you want to trade there that aggregates to stabilise the currency.

What you choose to actually pay in — Sterling, Yen, Bitcoin or apples — is irrelevant. I saw a contract once that required claims to be paid in herring. Doesn’t make herring into money.

 

[NoXion]

NoXion The idea that Beavers have no concept of value or economic activity because they are just dumb animals is how we are in this hellscape.

There's a massive irony in you saying this, when bitcoin itself is making a direct and massive contribution towards turning this planet into an approximation of Hell.

Of course beavers value things....do you think they value an Xbox more or fresh water more? See, they dont look quite so dumb now, do they?

You are equivocating the meaning of value. Beavers don't value anything in any economic sense. They pursue means of survival, yes. But value in an economic sense is an abstract human concept, and it is misplaced anthropomorphism to apply it to beavers.

Yes, at the moment humans still set up mining rigs and monitor them, but gradually human intervention will lesson. Robots are much quicker and cleverer than any human.

No they are not. You are confusing two seperate fields of engineering, robotics and artificial intelligence. Even then, until the day when the first fully-autonomous AI capable of developing its own goals and motivations wakes up, even AIs will need to be created, installed and directed by humans. At which point you've no longer got a piece of equipment, but a worker. This idea of workerless production is utopian nonsense.

The value of bitcoin is unchanging, one bitcoin is always worth one bitcoin, 1/21m of the total supply. Yes its exchange rate with the dollar goes up and down in the short term, but over the longer term the exchange rate operates predictably on a four year cycle that can be relatively easily calculated.from the amount of energy that has been dispensed into the network (the hashrate) and current dollar cost per joule summed.

By the same argument, the value of a penny is unchanging, because 100 pennies are always worth £1.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

tbf I think the only point of qwerty's that has any merit is that other animals also have a sense of value. Yes, even economic value - hence the ability to judge when to abandon the dam and start a new one or when to stay and try to repair the old one, which is a cost-benefit analysis.

The rest is gobbledygook. I can only really repeat that looking at the phenomenology here is helpful, by which I simply mean look at what actually exists, what is actually happening. And there you will just find electronic tokens as part of a game, with an enormous useless industry tacked onto it.

The idea that bitcoin miners are environmentally responsible is of course idiocy. Not only does looking at the thing itself show that this work produces no real-world benefit, but it also shows up just how fucking nasty these operations are. They target areas with cheap electricity supplies and minimal regulation in remote parts of places like China, Russia and Venezuela. Why the fuck do you think Venezuela's lecky is so cheap? It's not because it's really windy there. And these miners operate right next door to towns that suffer from regular power cuts. They prey on the poor and vulnerable, stealing their energy in the here and now. And they destroy the planet for everyone in the long term. This shit is evil, qwerty, and so are the people running it.

 

[NoXion]

tbf I think the only point of qwerty's that has any merit is that other animals also have a sense of value. Yes, even economic value - hence the ability to judge when to abandon the dam and start a new one or when to stay and try to repair the old one, which is a cost-benefit analysis.

Economics is a mass phenomenon, and as far as I am aware beavers do not have any kind of mass society.

 

[Hearse Pileup]

lol, bitcoin mines really don't run themselves.

Try leaving a server in the middle of a room and ask it for bitcoin.

Ok, you have to plug it in, network connection, etc. But once it's set up it runs itself, no?

You still have to pay for square footage, power consumption, maintennance, infrastructure, power outage fallbacks. This is the labour that is involved in bitcoin mining - it's you turning the crank, not the numbers that your fancy calculator spits out.

E2A: Unless we're going to start advocating for machine rights to self-determination. In which case you're going to want to start paying your miners. Also turning your computer off is now illegal without the computer's consent.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Economics is a mass phenomenon, and as far as I am aware beavers do not have any kind of mass society.

They don't use symbolic thinking to create abstract measures of value that they can compute and compare, for sure.

The human capacity for symbolic thinking is a hugely powerful thing. Sadly it can also lead people down rabbit holes in search of magic stores of energy, a mistake no beaver would ever make.

 

[mauvais]

I'm enjoying the idea that bitcoin is crystallised energy. Can I interest you in some car exhaust futures?

 

[NoXion]

They don't use symbolic thinking to create abstract measures of value that they can compute and compare, for sure.

The human capacity for symbolic thinking is a hugely powerful thing. Sadly it can also lead people down rabbit holes in search of magic stores of energy, a mistake no beaver would ever make.

Indeed. And I think that is an illustration of how the differences between those two phenomena are so great as to be qualitatively different, even if every individual step "in between" is only quantitively different from its neighbours. Much like how humans are qualitatively different to bacteria, even though we ultimately evolved from single-celled organisms much like them.

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

Have you ever heard of a place called Iran?
I'll bet a pound to a shard of shit you're invested in bitcoin.

]

Axis of evil, snuggled between two countries the west bombed for oil, surrounded by US military bases? That Iran?,
I've invested many many hours learning about bitcoin. Best investment I've ever made.

BigTom

Bitcoin has been around for 11 years. Humans have been destroying the environment for centuries, the last century in particular has seen a massive acceleration in that destruction. The petro-dollar runs on finite energy (oil) with infinite currency; a bitcoin economy is run on finite currency with unlimited energy. It is directly in the interests of people who believe in bitcoin to maximise the resources and attention going to renewable sources. The idea that if bitcoin didnt exist we would have all this renewable energy for other things is a nonsense - we wouldnt have the renewable energy with bitcoin miners driving its sourcing. The technological advances driven by mining far outweigh any other drivers.

As for lost coins, the coins dont cease to exist, they are still there, inaccessible, but still there. Approx 4m coins are assumed to be lost. A person who owns 1btc still owns 1/21m of the total supply, but a greater percentage of the circulating supply, which increases as per the mining schedule and decreases with the monetary velocity. Lost coins decrease the monetary velocity, but they do not change the total supply.

Bitcoins are infinitely divisible. You can get 0.00000000000000001 of a bitcoin, so if the circulating supply of btc decreases significantly, the greater the subdivision. But as I explained before dividing doesnt increase the supply. In fiat, when a dollar is printed it is worth the same as all the other dollars out there. In bitcoin when it is subdivided it is only worth a fraction of the original, the total supply is fixed.

what matters is what I can buy with that bitcoin, and since basically everything is priced in £ that means that the value of bitcoin is totally utterly dependent on the exchange rate to £.

The phrase "the price of everything and the value of nothing" is perfectly exemplified by that comment.

kabbes, oh kabbes!

This is WEIRD thinking . This is how western governments have set up the monetary system, I agree, but it doesnt have to be that way. You are falling into the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Just because that is what happens now doesnt mean it is necessary. Bitcoin is proof that there is an alternative. Lots of things have been used as money - standing stones, aggry beads, livestock, metals, salt. I must confess I've never heard of herring being used as currency, but certainly cod was currency in Newfoundland and mackerel is a common prison currency in the US.

NoXion The idea that beavers dont have a value system is simply human supremacy, thinking that human are somehow more sophisticated than those dumb animals that are purely motivated by survival and instinct. Survival and instinct are certainly related to what mammals ...human and non-human....give value to, but both beavers and humans make value based decisions in the context of survival and instinct. Value in an economic sense is merely the reifiation of that expression of values.

Your point about AI becoming a worker when it is fully autonomous is interesting. Why does it have to be a "worker"? There are loads of examples of workerless production. I produced a set of shelves the other week, no one told me to do that, no one paid me to do that, I was not a "worker" in any traditional economic sense, but still the shelves got built. Why can AI not become autonomous agents seeking out the means by which to express their value schema to the world?

The value of a penny has changed from 1/240 of a pound to 1/100 of a pound within living memory.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

The value of a penny has changed from 1/240 of a pound to 1/100 of a pound within living memory.

Again, no energy for the rest of it, but this is factually wrong. Decimalisation involved what was essentially a change to a new currency. The old 1d coins were taken out of circulation in a matter of weeks, replaced by the 'new penny' that was worth 1/100 of a pound rather than 1/240.

It was officially called the 'new penny' to show it was not the same thing as the old penny. People quickly started not saying 'new' once they were used to it.